What To Do If Your Boss Is A Micromanager

When Tina
Fox was working as a regional manager in a San Diego consulting firm, she winced each morning as the dozen members of her team filtered into the office. Her boss, a vice president, kept tabs on everyone, even though they weren’t her direct reports. “Whenever someone would come in a few minutes late, she would immediately go up to them in the middle of the floor and say, ‘Why are you late? You didn’t call and let us know.’” Fox found the micromanaging painful. “We’re not talking about managing junior high students,” she says. “These were professionals making more than $100,000 a year.”

The boss kept up her micromanaging during meetings. If a team member would bring up a creative proposal, the boss would shoot it down and prescribe her own approach. “She would never accept someone else’s idea,” says Fox. After one meeting dragged on for more than two hours, Fox got up and volunteered to bring in some coffee from
Starbucks. The vice president intervened, insisting she wanted to get the coffee herself. “There were days I would walk into the office and say to myself, ‘Can I keep doing this?’” says Fox, who is now a manager in San Diego for Menlo Park-based staffing firm Robert Half.

Fox recalled her experiences with the nightmare boss this week when Robert Half’s Accountemps division, which handles temporary staffing for accounting, finance and bookkeeping jobs, released a survey on micromanagement. It asked 450 employees about their experiences with overbearing bosses. Nearly 60% said they had worked for a micromanager at some point in their career. Of that group, 55% said it decreased their productivity and 68% said it dampened their morale.

None of those statistics surprise me. While I haven’t had a boss who was as bad as Fox’s supervisor, two of my bosses over the years had micromanaging tendencies, which cut into my ability to get work done and made me feel lousy. In one of my jobs, I never once missed a deadline, yet my boss sent me emails all day long making sure I was tracking not only my own work but my colleagues’.

What should you do if you are saddled with a micromanaging boss? After more than 16 years in the staffing field, Fox has come up with five guidelines. I’ll summarize them below, with a bit of what I hope is my own wisdom.

1. Ask your boss what she expects from you.

It can be tough to communicate with someone who is oblivious about her faults, which describes most micromanagers. But it can help to ask her to lay out what tasks she wants you to perform. In the case of Fox’s boss, for example, the vice president wanted every team member accounted for by 9 a.m. Fox could have coordinated with her team and asked them to call her if they were stuck in traffic or facing other delays. Fox could have promised the VP that Fox herself would report any expected latecomers.

2. Ask your boss to give you a sense of the big picture.

Supervisors are often working under pressures that we can’t anticipate. Fox’s boss may have been coping with onerous client demands or her own micromanaging supervisor. In my case, my boss had to have her team meet a hard nightly deadline. She should have found a better way to manage her anxiety, but knowing the gravity of her responsibility helped me cope. Ask your boss to share as much as she can about her workload. What can you do to produce the best results for her?

3. Be proactive.

Once you’ve been micromanaged, you can anticipate what your boss will do. I learned to give my boss progress reports before she asked for them. It was easier to compose and send frequent email updates on my own timetable than to field interruptions. Fox could have prepped her staff before meetings for the likelihood that the vice president would reject their ideas.

4. Demonstrate empathy

After a clash with your boss, ask for a meeting and start by saying you understand that a situation might have been difficult for her. After the coffee incident, Fox could have said, I realize it was probably not the right time for me to interrupt our meeting and go for coffee; I should have asked you if it was appropriate to take a break. "If you share the blame with them, that can help you move forward,” she says.

5. Consider moving on.

Sometimes nothing works. Fox says she tried communicating, empathizing and being proactive, but her boss’s bad habits persisted. She gave up on improving the relationship and started to look for a new job. Fortunately for her, a position opened up in another department and she was able to move within the company.